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9/11 10th Anniversary: F-15 pilot Dan Nash recalls response

Lt. Col. Dan Nash, Barnes Air Reserve Base

08.20.2011 | WESTFIELD - Lt. Col. Dan Nash stands with one of the Air National Guard 104th Fighter Wing's F-15 Eagles at Barnes Municipal Airport. Nash was one of two pilots scrambled from Cape Cod's Otis Air Guard Base as the attacks of September 11, 2011 unfolded.
(Greg Saulmon | The Republican)

The pilots could see the smoke almost as soon as they reached 30,000 feet, 130 miles from Manhattan.

Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy flew the lead F-15 Eagle fighter jet that morning. His wingman, then-Maj. Dan Nash, who had been scheduled as the lead pilot in the event of a scramble, deferred to Duffy’s previous experience with a hijacked aircraft. Eight years earlier, in February 1993, Duffy had flown an escort mission when a man armed with what turned out to be a starter pistol diverted Ethiopia-bound Lufthansa Flight 592 to New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Now Duffy was headed to New York again in pursuit of a hijacked airliner.

As the eagle flies, it’s 153 miles from Cape Cod’s Otis Air National Guard Base to New York City. Duffy and Nash cruised at a supersonic Mach 1.2. “We got there as fast as we could,” Nash, now a lieutenant colonel with the Air Guard's 104th Fighter Wing at Barnes Regional Airport in Westfield, recalled recently.

Sept. 5: A Pilot’s View: Lt. Col. Dan Nash, of the Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing, flew on alert from Otis Air Base to New York City

Sept. 6: Survivors’ Stories: Susan A. Frederick, a native of Holyoke who descended from the 80th floor or the World Trade Center’s North Tower to safety, and John V. Murphy, formerly of Longmeadow, who was about a block away from his office at the trade center, share their recollections of when disaster struck

Sept. 11: Remembering the Day: A look at how Sept. 11, 2001 will be remembered; Ann Murphy, sister of World Trade Center victim Brian J. Murphy, of Westfield, shares her personal perspective on what the day means for her family

Sept. 12: Tyler’s Courts: Basketball courts are created to honor the memory of Tyler Ugolyn, whose family’s roots are in Springfield; also, a regional look at 10th anniversary commemoration events

Sept. 13: Rick’s Place: The family and friends of Eric “Rick” Thorpe, of Wilbraham, established Rick’s Place to help children cope with grief when they lose a family member; also, how everyday life has changed because of Sept. 11, 2001

They were 70 miles out when an air traffic controller told them that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. “We were scrambled on a suspected hijacking of American (Flight)11,” Nash said. “And, that’s all we knew. So when they said a second aircraft had hit the World Trade Center, my reaction was, ‘Well, what happened to American 11?’ Because nobody was talking about that anymore.”

Flying faster than the speed of sound as the world changed in the blink of an eye, the pilots suddenly understood the source of the smoke on the horizon.

“When I left the base it was peace time,” Nash said. “Then, I thought I saw the start of World War III.”

Nash, who now lives in Southampton, stands with a kind of permanent crook at his hips, as though his natural state is sitting strapped into a cockpit, and his body resists more mundane tasks like standing for photographs. Around the base and in the air he’s known as “Nasty,” a call sign derived from the way his name appears on the flight roster: “Nash. D.” Becoming a pilot had long been his dream: “Something about flying always seemed romantic. Basically, I knew what I wanted to do since I was 10 years old -- so, I was lucky enough to get to do it."

He had arrived at the Otis Air Guard base in 2000 after 10 years' active duty in the Air Force and settled into his role as a scheduling officer. He mapped out which pilots flew which sorties, and flew himself three or four times a week. Typically, a "flight" for the Guard pilots would be an all-day affair, from pre-flight briefing to post-flight debriefing. “It takes a while,” Nash said of the process.

Then, there were the scrambles; most of the time, they are an emergency response in which fighter pilots are sent to investigate unidentified aircraft. Nash had been scrambled a number of times, always for false alarms. Sometimes the unidentified craft turned out to be a Coast Guard airplane; sometimes a plane used by sportsmen to spot schools of fish in the Atlantic.

Otis kept two of its roughly 18 F-15 fighters -- as well as one or two “spares” -- on alert, fully armed and ready to scramble. In all, Nash said, six fighters were on alert status to defend the eastern seaboard each day in September 2001: the two at Otis, two at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and two at Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida.

At 8:34 a.m. on Sept. 11, air traffic controller Dan Bueno at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Boston Center facility tried to contact the military through the FAA’s Cape Cod facility. According to a transcript of communications involving American Airlines Flight 11, released by the FAA in 2002, Bueno told the Cape Cod controller: “I have a situation with American 11. I want to talk to Otis. I need to scramble some fighters.”

A supervisor at the Cape Cod facility referred Bueno to the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., a division of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). In the meantime, word trickled down to the Otis operations personnel that there was a possible hijacking. “One of the alert pilots on duty that morning heard the words ‘possible hijacking’ and said to his fellow alert pilot, Maj. Dan Nash, that they should suit up immediately,” Technical Sgt. Bruce Vittner wrote in his account of the base’s response on 9/11, entitled “Historian’s Report for Sept. 11, 2001.”

F-15 Eagles are shown at Otis Air National Guard Base, Mass., on April 9, 1999.

The official scramble order from the Northeast Air Defense Sector came in to the Otis command post at 8:46 a.m. -- the same moment that Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Nash and Duffy were in the air at 8:52 a.m., Vittner wrote, flying on full after-burners.

As they arrived in the sky over Manhattan and established a combat air patrol, Nash couldn’t believe what he saw: “We couldn’t fly through all the debris; we had to fly around it as we intercepted all the aircraft still in the area,” Nash is quoted in Vittner’s report.

While they were scrambled to intercept a hijacked airliner, the pilots’ role in the response quickly evolved. The FAA and the Northeast Air Defense Sector wanted all civilian aircraft to land and get out of the way, Nash said, and it was their task was to make that happen. Traffic had already come to at halt at JFK. Any planes taxiing for take-off were sent back. “Basically it was the two of us flying over Manhattan, trying to convince smaller aircraft to get away from the scene,” Nash recalled.

Controllers from the Northeast Air Defense Sector would spot an aircraft on their radar and ask the pilots to investigate and steer it away from Manhattan’s airspace. Over a four-hour period, Nash and Duffy repeated the process for between 50 and 100 aircraft.

When the South Tower of the trade center fell at 9:59 a.m., Nash was flying east over Kennedy, escorting a small civilian airliner to a safe landing. “When we turned around,” he recalled, “Manhattan was covered with what I thought was smoke. But it was the dust from the collapsed tower.”

The pilots were over the North Tower when it collapsed at 10:28 a.m. From an altitude of 6,000 feet, according to Vittner’s report, Duffy watched the tower implode. Nash wasn’t looking down at the time; he only saw the aftermath. The plume of smoke and ash, he estimated, rose 5,000 feet above streets below.

“I thought I watched 30,000 people die,” Nash recalled, "but there was no emotional tie to it. The emotion was anger at the situation.”

The hijackers of the 1970s and 1980s acted according to often-predictable motivations. They demanded the release of imprisoned associates; they attempted to collect ransoms; they hoped to grab headlines to advance political statements. The Lufthansa flight that Duffy escorted in 1993 was hijacked by a man who wanted to join his family in the United States. In a 1993 publication titled “Criminal Acts Against Civil Aviation,” the FAA reported that Nebiu Zewolde Demeke -- who was eventually convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the hijacking -- had been denied a student visa to enter the country. “He said that a number of personal and family problems required his presence here,” the report reads.

Demeke was of a vastly different mind than the 9/11 hijackers, and he represents the type of threat which commercial airline pilots were trained to deal with in the pre-9/11 world. Airline procedures, Nash explained, called for pilots to cooperate with hijackers, to make sure that none of the passengers were hurt and to get everyone down on the ground safely. Fighter pilots attempted to support that effort: “Our protocol would be to intercept it and stay behind it until the controllers knew what the aircraft was doing,” Nash said.

The scenario of a hijacker flying a plane into a building was barely a blip on the radar screen of those involved in analyzing airline security before 9/11. In the wake of the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, Vice President Al Gore headed a commission tasked with reporting on security threats to air travel and traffic in the United States. But, despite “having thoroughly canvassed available expertise inside and outside of government,” the 9/11 Commission found, Gore’s commission failed to anticipate the possibility of a suicide hijacking or the use of an airplane -- particularly a commercial airliner -- as a weapon.

Moreover, NORAD focused its planning on situations that would afford the military plenty of advance warning to scramble fighters to threats like hijackings. NORAD’s planning scenarios “occasionally considered the danger of hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft that were coming from overseas,” the 9/11 Commission’s report reads.

“Obviously, after 9/11 the belief that a terrorist would take possession of an aircraft only as a tool to negotiate was no longer realistic,” said Maj. Matthew T. Mutti, executive officer for the 104th Fighter Wing at Barnes. The 9/11 attacks, Mutti said, redefined the Eastern Air Defense Sector’s strategic planning. "Our responsiveness to those internal threats and our ability to defend against them is one of the most important legacies of 9/11,” Mutti said, explaining that the Air National Guard’s tactics and training have evolved to prepare pilots to assess and address domestic threats as well as those originating beyond the nation’s borders.

"Our fighters will scramble and intercept domestic and civilian flights in training scenarios so that they’re better prepared to respond in a real-world situation,” Mutti said.

Much of the new preparedness for domestic threats has involved improving communications among civilian and military agencies. “We won’t be limited in our abilities to communicate with external agencies, which will allow us to better respond to domestic or internal threats,” Mutti said. “At a minimum, the information flow back and forth and the decision matrix is better defined in terms of a response to a threat from civil aviation."

As the impact of United Airlines Flight 175 erased any doubt that the American Flight 11 crash had been an accident, the fighter pilots’ role in the 9/11 response became suddenly murky, according to Nash. “At that point it was apparent to me that it was a deliberate act. And now the FAA didn’t know what to do with us,” he said.

Later that morning, as Nash and Duffy flew over Manhattan, a civilian air controller offered a chilling thought: “If we have any more of these, you guys are going to have to shoot it down.”

Nash knew that scenario was unlikely. “The way we were trained, nobody’s going to shoot down a civilian airliner without authorization from very high up,” he said. The 9/11 Commission noted in its report that, prior to the attacks, only the National Command Authority -- shorthand for the president and secretary of defense -- could issue an order to shoot down a commercial aircraft.

From Nash's perspective, “the F-15 is the world’s best fighter” for air-to-air combat. “It’s got an undefeated record of 104 kills and no losses. So even with all that, we couldn’t prevent what happened that day.”

After he left the base at 6 p.m. on 9/11, Nash went home and spent the evening watching television news. He stayed up late. He’d spent over four hours with a birds-eye view of the events unfolding in Manhattan, but being airborne added a level of detachment -- and, besides, he had a job to do. Finally seeing the day’s events through the lenses of those on the ground seemed to bring the horror home. He was angry.

“We had a lot of freedoms that we took for granted then,” Nash said in reflecting on what happened 10 years ago this month. “I don’t know how much you travel, but going through airports now is kind of a hassle. And people took advantage of that to use airplanes as weapons.”

In 2006, Nash traveled to New York for a fifth-year anniversary gathering of 9/11 first responders. Last year he spoke at a ceremony at Springfield’s Raymond Sullivan Safety Complex. So far, he has no plans for this anniversary of the attacks.

Asked whether he maintains any of his own private rituals for each anniversary, Nash said he needs few reminders. He’s still one of the go-to guys for 9/11 retrospective interviews and in the waning days of August was scheduled to spend time with reporters from regional news media and national TV network reporters.

“It’s just something that’s always with me,” he said.

NORAD acknowledged the role which the Otis Guard unit played in the 9/11 response 10 days after the attacks. When the information became public, the base was immediately flooded with media requests, according to Vittner’s “Historian’s Report.” Lt. Col. Maggie Quenneville, community relations officer for the unit, and public affairs specialist Cliff MacDonald worked rotating 12-hour shifts. CNN filmed at the base for three days. Diane Sawyer participated in a fly-along for a segment of "Good Morning America."

Despite the flurry of media coverage, Nash was reluctant to talk about his experience with his family. He still hasn’t fully discussed his role in the response with his children.

One of his kids is a teenager now; the other will be soon. One of Nash’s favorite activities is to take them on hikes to explore Mount Tom.

“Now’s probably a pretty good time to talk about it with them,” he said.